Climbing Higher Pictures

The following review was written in conjunction with the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and reflects the cut of the film which screened for Press.

The Trotsky Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: A

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. It happens to apply to not only not-drinking-six-beers-at-the-same-time, but Jacob Tierney’s The Trotsky as well. The film, produced entirely in Canada on the government’s dime, is about a man who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. That man is Jared Baruchel. To say this has been his year is something of an understatement. She’s Out of My League opened pretty well, considering the lack of other known talent. How to Train Your Dragon is, as of me writing this, still sitting at number 1 at the box office, and he is also starring alongside Nicolas Cage in Jerry Bruckheimer’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The kid is literally everywhere, and he’s making the scrawny slightly unattractive leading man the new staple of the Hollywood machine. He’s adorable enough that you have to feel sympathy for him, and courageous enough to be a motivating force. Whoever gave him the break with Tropic Thunder deserves serious props.

Anyway, in this comedy he plays a disgruntled teenager who believes his destiny to be intertwined with the legendary revolutionary, to the point of thinking that his life will inevitably play out in the same manner. He’ll meet a girl named Alexandra who’ll be 9 years older than him. They’ll fall in love and get married, at which point he will be exiled from his home. His father takes his attempts at staging a hunger strike at his factory to be a sign of disrespect, and removes Leon from his private school life, placing him into a public school setting in tune with the education of his personal savior.

Everything that follows is nothing short of genius, as the friends he makes, the programs he creates, and the will he exerts on the school administration come to a head. In a way, it’s the sort of film that every apathetic high school student should see. It may be a work of fiction, but if we had more kids like Leon, the youth of today might actually be able to get something done. He doesn’t stand for any particular “ism”, doesn’t espouse Trotsky’s own moral views like he’s a carbon copy of the man, but simply works tirelessly to convince others that getting involved is worth their time and energy. The primary question of the film is Boredom vs. Apathy, and it is here where the filmmakers draw their battle lines. Sure the kid is crazy, sure he may very well be stalking an attractive PhD student because he believes that he is meant to marry her, and sure his relationship with his oppressive family is not anything we’d want for ourselves, but is everyone else more crazy for remaining silent, for doing nothing, even when they spend most of their days complaining about the wrongs they can see with their own eyes? How far would you go to fight for the things you take for granted, even if it doesn’t seem like you have anything worth fighting for anymore?

You gotta hand it to the kid, he does an awful lot of things that none of us would have the courage to accomplish, and you never doubt him for a moment. Maybe it was meant to happen, maybe he thinks that his reincarnation is a prophecy that will become a self-fulfilling one, but what does it matter as long as he’s actually getting stuff done? If you ask me, we could all learn a lot from him, and that’s what makes this movie such a powerful piece of cinema. You need to see it, and I hope it gets a theatrical release of some kind to allow it to be seen. That is all.